The Problem With DEI Is White-Supremacist Perpetration and Perpetuation of Enforced Black Inferiority - Part 3

While it cannot be pregnably gainsaid that the Chancellor of Cambridge, Lord Smith of Finsbury, is dead-on-target when the veteran and culturally progressive Member of the British House of Lords - aka Sir Christopher Robert Smith - poignantly observes the imperative need for the Jason Arday Tragedy not be used as either a cheap shot or a lightning rod by cynical and pathologically racist academics and politicians to avoid effectively addressing the indispensable need to ensure the prevalence of racial and cultural diversity among the staff and the faculty of the British Academy as a whole, but especially at the elite and flagship academies, as a salutary means of ensuring the existence of a wholesome and a civilized British Society.

Now, this observation is of great and utmost significance because between 1973 and 1974, that is, in the wake of the conclusion of the Biafran or the Nigerian Civil War (1970), when the future Nobel Literature Prize Laureate Professor Wole Soyinka - aka Akinwande Oluwole Babatunde Soyinka - was invited to join the Faculty of Cambridge University as a Senior Overseas Fellow of Churchill College, the then globally established playwright and Head/Chairperson of the Department of Drama and Theater Arts at the University of Ibadan had automatically assumed that he would be affiliated with the Department of English or any such language arts-related department in the humanities. At the time, coincidentally and in retrospect, the native of Abeokuta, Western Nigeria, was approximately the same age as the late Professor Arday.

But, of course, any real or true similarity of this comparative narrative immediately ends here; you see, the very first Continental African - Indigenous or Non-Indigenous - to be awarded the Nobel Literature Prize - would meet with a rude awakening when he was cavalierly shunted, literally, into the Boondocky Backalleyways of Cambridge’s Department of Anthropology, as the presently 92-year-old Professor Soyinka would later bitterly recount in one of his most philosophically engaging and celebrated treatises, namely “Myth, Literature and the African World” (Cambridge UP, 1976), if memory serves this author accurately.

Now, we wistfully recall this historic example of the sort of pathological racism that Chancellor Christopher Robert Smith also caustically alludes to in the very brief news report that forms the matrix of this causerie or discourse which, the reporter reliably informs his readers, was based on an article that Lord Smith had authored and published in Britain’s Telegraph newspaper (See Part One of this Series). We shall, shortly, in due course, provide ourselves with the privileged opportunity to delve into and critically examine the detailed contents of Lord Smith’s original piece from the Telegraph.

Now, where the relevance of the foregoing brief narrative on Professor Soyinka’s bittersweet experience entailing the summary and the cavalier degradation of the proverbial salt of the academic worth and the integrity of the European-trained crackerjack Indigenous African Intellectual and Scholar, to speak much less about Professor Soyinka’s “surfeit of creative genius,” as the Non-Indigenous Continental African Nobel Literature Prize Laureate, Nadine Gordimer, once had the prime occasion to eloquently remark about the esthetic elegance of the works of another immortalized Nigerian novelist and thinker, Professor Chinua, the former teacher of the present writer and a contemporary of Professor Soyinka at the University of Ibadan in the 1950s, regarding the almost incontrovertible fact that it is the rarefied and the inimitable genius of pioneering and path-paving work of both Professor Wole Soyinka, in particular, and Professor Chinua Achebe, for good measure, and other equally renowned Giants of African Letters like the recently deceased Professor Ngugi wa Thiong’O (aka James Ngugi), a former teacher of the present writer at New York University, that made it possible for latter-day Continental adAfrican-Descended Scholars and Intellectuals like the late Professor Jason Arday not only to be at least glad-handedly suffered or tolerated on any Oxbridge campus, but even to be hyperbolically, apparently, held unusually high up to public admiration, irrespective of whether, indeed, such media and/or academic cynosure was really deserved, our profound apologies to Oxford University’s Professor Emeritus Richard Dawkins.

In other words, it well appears that in a strenuous and a missionary bid to morally and, perhaps, even politically compensate for the “Egregious Blunders” and the primitive and the feral misdeeds against the Soyinkas, the Achebes and the Ngugis and, perhaps, one could also add to the foregoing the extremely short list of the usual suspects, as it were, the Ayi Kwei Armahs and, of course, the Buchi Emechetas, that culminated in the kind of academic and cultural overreach that literally caused what the Criminally Conservative African American United States’ Associate Supreme Court Justice, Mr. Clarence “Who Put This Pubic Hair On My Coke” Thomas, once self-servingly described as the seemingly inveterate “High-Tech Lynching” of hardworking and decent Black Men in American Society who aspired to the highest echelons of positions of public responsibility and power.

Indeed, even as Chancellor Smith bluntly suggested in the very brief news story that forms the basis of our present discussion, the elevation of the late Professor Jason Arday to the status of an Academic Superstar and Almost a Legend well appears to have provoked the seismic groundswell of the visceral and, to be certain, the latent ire of hardcore Aryanist and Fascist MAGACRATS who would have better preferred that Professor Arday had been hired at Cambridge as Head of Janitorial Services, rather than as a bona fide Senior Member of the University’s Faculty and then profusely and profoundly celebrated as the Best MAGA Stooge and Slave in Our Time.

Which also begs the question of whether, indeed, the 41-year-old Professor Arday was the worst of his kind at his Oxbridge academy. Even so, as former Bates College, Maine, US, Professor Austin Tyler Harper authoritatively testified to a BBC interviewer in the wake of the tragic passing of Professor Arday, what is really at fault here is the perennially pathological inability of “The White Men,” mostly, and “The White Women” who call the shots, for the most part, in our Ivory Tower Academies who seem to be far more interested in filling up DEI quotas than hiring qualified ethnic and racial minorities who, by the way, abound all over the United States and in most Civilized Western Societies to staff specially earmarked vacancies on the faculties and administrations with competent ethnic, racial and gender minorities.

Which, by the way, is absolutely in no way to suggest that the overwhelming majority of the White - “Mainstream” - Hires are necessarily the best of their kind or ilk for the jobs they routinely hired and assigned to do or perform.

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
E-mail: [email protected]